An out-of-office feature, or vacation mode feature, is a common mechanism among electronic mail (e-mail) systems. It allows a user to notify senders of e-mails, which are received at the user's email account or inbox, that the user will either not respond to an incoming message, or will be delayed in responding, due to the user being out of the office or on vacation.
Out-of-office messaging rules vary depending on the type of e-mail system employed by the user, and can include a rule to merely reply to all e-mails indicating that the user is out of the office for a certain amount of time, a rule providing a period of time during which the out-of-office response is sent, rules setting various levels of responses depending on the sender of the original message, among others.
Sometimes a user forgets to turn off the out-of-office setting when the user returns to the office. This is especially true if the user merely turns on the out of office feature without configuring a return date option in the application to deactivate automatic notifications. Further, in cases when a period of time to provide out-of-office messages is specified, the user may return to the office early and forget that an out-of-office message is being sent. In either case, the out of-office should no longer be sent once the user returns to the office.